Cronofy's Adam Bird on Future of Interview Scheduling

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Adam Bird:
This is Adam Bird, CEO and co-founder of Cronofy, and I'm next on the RecTech podcast.

Speaker 2:
Welcome to RecTech, the podcast where recruiting and technology intersect. Each month, you'll hear from vendors shaping the recruiting world, along with recruiters who'll tell you how they use technology to hire talent. Now here's your host, the mad scientist of online recruiting, Chris Russell.

Chris Russell:
That's right, welcome to the only podcast that helps employers and recruiters connect with more candidates through technology inspired conversations. If you want to know what the latest tools and tactics for finding talent online, this is your show. Today's episode is a vendor edition. This podcast is sponsored in part by our friends at Adzuna, the quality obsessed jobs search engine that's taking the market by storm. Adzuna wants to help America get back to work by allowing businesses to zero in on the right candidates, cut your cost per application, and engage with high quality candidates with Adzuna. Visit them at adzuna.com/hire to get started.

Chris Russell:
And we're also sponsored by Emissary, the text recruiting software that will supercharge your recruiting efforts. Americans spending 55 minutes a day texting on average. That time represents an enormous window of opportunity for recruiters to get the attention of candidates that are otherwise distracted and hard to reach. Head over to emissary.ai and book a demo today to learn how their text recruiting platform will help you connect with your candidates faster and more efficiently.

Chris Russell:
All right, so interview scheduling is one of the biggest pain points in recruiting today, causes a lot of headaches in the overall candidate experience. According to a survey by Cronofy and JobAdder, some stats for you to take away with, 64% of recruiters take two or more days to schedule one. 26% take four or more days to schedule the interview. And 90% of recruiters make two or more phone calls or send two or more emails to schedule the actual interview. Cronofy is a new scheduling platform that aims to solve this problem and greatly reduced time to schedule these interviews. Joining me via phone is their CEO and co-founder, Adam Bird. Adam, welcome to RecTech. It's great to have you.

Adam Bird:
Thanks Chris. Great to be here.

Chris Russell:
Excellent. So give us a quick history of Cronofy. When did you start the company and how'd you get into this overall recruiting space?

Adam Bird:
So we started Cronofy in 2014 and really the opportunity we saw was broadly in how do applications that have a scheduling requirement actually safely interact with people's calendar data? How do you do that from a technical basis and how do you kind of do that in a way that respects people's privacy and kind of protects that access? It very quickly became apparent that recruiting was an area that this was a very acute problem. And so we built essentially a core sync engine that handles all that connectivity piece and then exposed a series of APIs that we've been working with our integration partners over the past few years, on embedding into all sorts of software applications here, people like GoDaddy use us as their website builder, but increasingly in the HR space as well. So people like PageUp, Hired, Phenom, People, Teamtailor. There's a whole host of recruitment platforms that are using us to get that real time access and deliver that real-time scheduling to their candidates.

Chris Russell:
Okay. So you're kind of the underlying scheduling technology they use to help make that happen, right?

Adam Bird:
Totally. Yeah. We've often been called Stripe for scheduling. The idea is you wouldn't go ahead and try and set up a payments engine, we're exactly that for scheduling.

Chris Russell:
Yeah, yeah. Very cool. And you have a new schedule of product, kind of a public facing version. It reminds me of Calendly a bit, I think a better version of Calendly. Just talk about that briefly.

Adam Bird:
Yeah. So I hesitate to use the word better, I think it's fit for a different purpose. So services like Calendly, and I know HubSpot have this kind of built into them, this idea that you have a link that anyone can go to and book in. And that's great in a number of use cases where the person who's hosting that link is happy with the compromise of keeping their calendar up to date and keeping their calendar open all the time. But it also lacks a degree of personalization as well, that I have to keep on logging in with my details each time, whenever I want to book a call with you.

Adam Bird:
The approach we've taken with the scheduler is really everything we've learned from working with some integrated scheduling and all sorts of workflows, is how do you set that up in such a way that it becomes really low touch for the person to personalize the link? So in this case, the recruiter. How does the recruiter create a great candidate experience by giving the candidate just two clicks to book in? And that's all linked back, it's got all of their information all tied in with them. But also do that in a way that protects the recruiters calendar, or indeed the hiring manager's calendar. Because often the recruiter is booking this on behalf of the hiring manager and the hiring manager doesn't want to keep their calendar open all the time. So we've solved those key problems and then providing add-ins for tools like Gmail, for Outlook, for Zendesk, and Chrome extensions to make that process super easy.

Chris Russell:
Yeah. What have you learned about interview scheduling? You talked about the low touch, less clicks as possible experience, but have you learned any overall lessons about scheduling interviews over these last six years or so?

Adam Bird:
I think the most important, I think the industry is aware is this candidate experience piece. Is actually, you want to put your company's best foot forward and part of that is personalization. So if the candidate receives an anonymous link to fill in, that speaks volumes to how important they are to your company. And in a competitive situation, you want to make sure that the candidate feels special, they feel like you want them to be interviewing for this job. And then the other side is that time to hire piece and how you need to get people in the door as quickly as possible, because the longer they're not interviewing with you, the more chances they go for someone else. But also, recruiters shouldn't be doing admin. Recruiters should be doing what they do very, very well. It's getting to the human behind the candidate and the right fit for the role rather than back and forth on email and essentially just doing something that a computer can do far better.

Chris Russell:
So talk about the product a bit more, Adam. I know you have the API version, which allows partners to tap into that technology, but the scheduler, I just started using it myself these past few weeks. Talk about how it's tailored to recruitment and talk about some of these use cases for it and the benefits of it.

Adam Bird:
So really the way we've looked at this from a recruitment perspective is firstly, that tailoring piece. So you can make sure the candidate has that information, but also you can start to combine the availability of multiple people. So in the situation where there's a panel interview that needs to be in place, then actually it's very, very difficult with services Calendly or these other services to create a link that's specific to the three people that need to be on the interview panel. And so we've made that super easy and provide all that kind of linking for that. But also scheduling on behalf of. So again, there may be situations where the recruiter doesn't have to be at the meeting, they're just booking on behalf of that hiring manager. So we've made that possible as well.

Adam Bird:
Again, our key focus throughout the entirety of this product has been around privacy. And how do you set up sharing in such a way that people aren't oversharing, they're only sharing for a period of time. And also we're seeing some interesting demand from third party external recruiters as well. So they want visibility on that recruitment process. Frankly, they want to get paid if that candidate is successful. So giving that third party, the recruiter, the ability to say, okay, from the client, yes, these are the three people we want to interview. Okay, I'm going to generate links for the client and get a copy of that in my own calendar so I know it's happening. So then I can do a follow-up with the client after that.

Adam Bird:
And then of course, with everything that's happened over the past few months, it has the full conferencing support as well. So you can create dedicated conferencing with passcodes and locked down. So no one can just hack on into someone else's interview during the process, not withstanding children at home and all that kind of thing, but certainly outside. And so really thinking about this. And we use this ourselves for recruitment. So as, if you like, customers of this entire process, it's been really important for us to think about how we would solve this.

Chris Russell:
And going back to the panel interview for a second, Adam, from my candidate perspective, what do they see? They get the link and then your system, your technology goes in there and basically finds the available times for all three people and shows them only those times. Is that how it works?

Adam Bird:
Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And also each of those people can have different rules around scheduling. So maybe one of the people wants a half hour buffer time between these appointments. We can respect all that. You have people in different time zones as well, and they have different working hours, even different working hours for different types of interviews. And really the reason we're able to do this is we've spent the last few years working with the greatest and best of the ATS world and understanding what their clients need. And really we've distilled that down into a set of capabilities that our integration clients can use. But then we've been able to surface into our end user tool. And for us, my personal view is scheduling should be embedded everywhere, but one also needs to be pragmatic in that not every ATS will get the capabilities to Cronofy has to offer. So by providing the scheduler as a separate tool, then no matter what ATS a recruiter is using or what management system they're using, they can still benefit from all of that learning.

Chris Russell:
Yeah. As far as the API goes, just talk about some of the other types of recruiting software you partner with from that perspective?

Adam Bird:
Yeah. So I guess what's been most interesting, so people like say PageUp, Hired, Phenom People, Personio, Teamtailor, ApplicantPro, Harken. We have a lot of customers in that space. And I think what that's given us is an insight into the four types of interviews that are conducted. There are the one-on-ones, there are the panel interviews, and this is where you get involved into, you may remember these, but meeting rooms that we used to use. And how do you [crosstalk 00:10:59].

Chris Russell:
What are those?

Adam Bird:
I know. Crazy, huh? How are those scheduled? But then you get into the realms of sequences and meetings as well. So there was a very much a trend coming forward where you would want to minimize the time on site for the candidate. And this is all about shortening the time to hire. It's like, well, there are three people they need to see. Now, it could be in any order, it can be a specific order. So we have all of the capabilities to give the candidates, say, you've got the morning on the 25th, but in that time we'll pack as many people that they need to see, with the appropriate buffer times, but make sure they can get through that process and get an answer incredibly quickly.

Adam Bird:
And then the last type we've seen is this more group hiring and assessment days. So we see this a lot in retail where you would say, right, okay, I'm going to set up a morning session. I can see up to 20 candidates or 10 candidates. And allowing people to book in and pick that slot that works for them and then the recruiter then runs them through some kind of assessment process or onboarding process.

Adam Bird:
And by approaching this from an AP, I know I'm a technologist. My history is in being a developer and a CTO and co-founder of my previous company. So by working from the bottom up and making sure all these capabilities are possible, that gives me absolute confidence that as we develop the scheduler tool, the end user tool, this can be just hooked into all sorts of processes. So what we're working with now is larger, high volume hiring, with Workday installations. Where we're triggering a scheduler link being generated in response to a transition in that pipeline. So you can start to possibly serve thousands of candidates and really have a massive impact on the time the recruiters are spending on hiring and make sure they can meet the demands of their organizations.

Chris Russell:
Yeah. It reminds me of, I think Home Depot a year or two ago, I read about their interview scaling process. And I think if you pass the assessment online, it actually sent you a link to go and schedule an interview with the store manager at a Home Depot store automatically.

Adam Bird:
We see that with [inaudible 00:13:15], we're working with, with Phenom, we're working with. Where there is that process, that pre-screening process, can happen right at the time the candidate first discovers about the role. And you can almost get them into the process and maintain that momentum in the process, so you can make sure that your hiring team are seeing the best possible people.

Chris Russell:
Yeah. This automation in recruiting is, to me, exciting and I'm glad to see we're making solid progress on that. Because it really does affect the candidate experience as a whole.

Adam Bird:
Yeah. But I hesitate. I know one thing I'm really conscious of with automation, and certainly I've been in tech for 25 years, is the rush to automation. You can lose the human in all of this. And deliberately our technology and the way we see our technology implemented successfully, is solve those problems that are best served by the computer to free up the recruiter to do the human bit. To properly understand the candidates, to properly assist them and guide them and make sure they are right for the role because any interview is a two-sided process. The candidate is interviewing you as much as you're interviewing the candidate. And we need to maximize that time to make sure that fit is right, so those roles are successful. Because let's not forget, we're not about getting people on seats. What we're about is getting successful employees.

Adam Bird:
And I think we've been really, really lucky, in that I don't believe anyone has worked with as many different software vendors and therefore in turn as many different customers and understand the different requirements of recruiting. And by delivering this as an underlying technology, we've had to learn about the entire industry and all of the educators and all of the wonderful ways different people are finding success hiring, and looking at ways we can take burden off peoples to allow them to focus on the higher value parts of the recruitment process.

Chris Russell:
Adam, what's it been like this year for you guys in terms of COVID-19 and in running the business, have you seen an increase in usage because of this?

Adam Bird:
We have. We have customers across a range of sectors. So some sectors have seen a bit of a downturn, but for us overall, we've done very well. We shipped our conferencing service very, very early on. We saw that as something we needed to do, we were already looking at how we might deliver that as part of the new scheduler product, but we did it in such a way that any of our customers. So for example, Howells use us to power their scheduling. We were able to allow them just to turn on conferencing with a small change to an API call, rather than having to kind of do anything else. So that's been really, really beneficial being able to do that. But also from a team level, we were a semi-hybrid organization before, we're now fully remote and then going back to hybrid. But that transitions.

Adam Bird:
And it's hard for people to maintain. And I think what we're seeing now and starting to see is those first few months were a honeymoon period, where everyone's saying, "Well, remote working is the future. It's fantastic." And really, we're kind of living off the social capital that we've built up over years of working together. And what's been fantastic from a management perspective is that it's forcing everyone to deal with outcomes rather than whether people are at work or not, or whether they say the right things. It's far easier now to, okay, what is being produced, which makes it very meritocratic. The problem with that is also it's in danger of dehumanizing. And the the Zoom avatar view you have on someone is very, very different to their 3D fleshy appearance when you see them face-to-face. So we've been very, very careful and trying to work out ways we can get people to interact face-to-face, to maintain the human aspect of work together, because work fundamentally is a social experience.

Chris Russell:
Let's talk about the schedule or in terms of what you get for that, there is a free version. You can go to Cronofy.com it's C-R-O-N-O-F-Y, if you're listening. Tell them what they get for that. And I think you have a pro version as well?

Adam Bird:
Yeah. So the free version is really your personal scheduling needs. So it gives you an add-in for Gmail or Outlook. We have application for Zendesk. We have a Chrome extension, and we've worked with sites like Salesforce and HubSpot. We're adding new sites all the time. And what that allows you to do with just two clicks is to generate a personalized scheduling link to whomever you're communicating with at the time. So whoever you're sending that email to would pull that all out, respect all your own scheduling rules and your real time availability and inject a link that that person can use into the email and then you can send that. So it's your communication, we're just adding this extra link to that communication. And then when the recipient of that email clicks on that they see the times shared for just them.

Adam Bird:
And then once they clicked on it, they can't reuse it. It's there, ready to go. And that gives you capabilities around setting your working hours, setting your buffer times, it's really everything you need just to schedule yourself. Where the pro feature comes in is when you want to do some interesting things like combining your availability with other people. So if you need to have two people or three people on a call, and in this case an interview, we have the whole capability for allowing you to request that availability and share that availablity with people, and then you just add the people you want, it's a super quick search by your contact details. And then you're generating that link that will work for those three people and the candidate, whoever's receiving that, picks that time.

Adam Bird:
Likewise, the ability to schedule on behalf of, and also things like branding as well. So the free version, it's Cronofy, it's very attractive, obviously, but it is Cronofy. The pro version will allow you to brand it to your company details. Then we have some early adopters of our enterprise solution as well. So part of, again, the benefit of coming at this from an integration perspective is our customers work with some of the most risk averse organizations in the world. So we've just onboarded a bank in France. And so if you can find a more risk averse organization than that, I applaud you. And so this is where Cronofy, its core infrastructure, it has all of the compliances, SOP2 to ISO27001, we're fully compliant with GDPR, with CCPA, with HIPAA.

Adam Bird:
And so our customers can be confident their data's safe, but also enterprises can start to look at these tools now. Because most of the tools in the market right now, frankly, they're designed for end users, they're designed for people who want to do it themselves and have a Gmail account or a G Suite account. The real opportunity and the real value we see is in supporting those larger organizations and giving them the opportunity to get this real time scheduling goodness embedded in their workflows and the business leaders at those organizations will see dramatic improvements in productivity as a result.

Chris Russell:
Adam, if you could pick one client success story in the last few years, who would that be and why?

Adam Bird:
Ooh, that's a difficult question there, Chris. We have loads.

Chris Russell:
Just impact. The biggest impact you've made on a client, I guess, would be another way to ask it.

Adam Bird:
Yeah. We started to get into realms of confidentiality and that kind of thing as well. I think-

Chris Russell:
Give me the generic.

Adam Bird:
Yeah. Because what's really interesting with what we do is it's not necessarily our clients that benefit, it's our client's clients. Which is a really peculiar position to be in. But certainly we get feedback from our clients that they're saving 95% of the time they were spending on scheduling. Because our software client, our ATS, has integrated real time calendar sync into that. So they're saving 300 hours a year by each recruiter, which is a phenomenal saving. And they're reducing the time to hire by six days, which again is in an increasingly competitive market. And so this is where for us, we add the benefit to our customer. Our API side is a lot of product managers at these companies, who are delivering this value to their customers. And those are the kinds of stats we see from those people.

Chris Russell:
Awesome, awesome. Talking with Adam Bird from Cronofy, and last question for you. What are you working on at the moment? What's coming down the pike here from a feature standpoint?

Adam Bird:
The great thing about working in a SAS industry is it never stops. It's kind of relentless. There's lots of improvements to the scheduler coming. And we've got some really interesting things around combining the availability of people who have views on the inside of their organization, optimizing those cash in flows. We talked about the enterprise piece as well. We also have under the hood, I said workflow triggers. So for example, how can we notify an ATS or an application or using coding systems like Zapier, how can we notify you an hour before an interview is about to happen, or even an hour afterwards or a week afterwards to do followups. So we're more than just scheduling, we're actually helping to drive workflow as well. And of course, on top of that, then we can trigger that to go into emails and Slack and Teams. And there's so much more we do. And this is where I think about things at a underlying technology level and what you'll see, the periscope pops up in the scheduler in some really interesting bits of functionality. And what we're doing now is popping up the periscope all over the place.

Chris Russell:
Well, it seems like a great product Adam, definitely one that's needed in the marketplace. So I think you guys have a pretty bright future and appreciate you joining me here today on RecTech.

Adam Bird:
Thanks, Chris. Great to talk to you.

Chris Russell:
That will do it for this episode of the RecTech podcast. Be sure to follow us on the socials, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, via the @RecTech media handle. We're also on YouTube, by the way. Thank you to my sponsors, Emissary and Adzuma. Be sure to check them out for tech recruiting and job advertising. Thanks for listening everyone and remember, always be recruiting.

Speaker 2:
Another episode of RecTech is in the books. Follow Chris on Twitter @chrisrussell, or visit rectechmedia.com where you can find the audio and links for this show on our blog. RecTech media helps keep employers and recruiters up to date through our podcasts, webinars and articles. So be sure to check out our other sites, recruiting headlines and HR podcasters to stay on top of recruiting industry trends. Thanks for listening and we'll see you soon on the next episode of RecTech, the recruiting technology podcast.